Chapter, We Focused on the So- Cieties of North America

C h a p t e r 1 M01_TOWN9489_01_SE_C01.indd 2 09/12/11 11:41 PM Native North America Before European Contact Stories versus Science Beginnings We Were Always Here The Scientific Evidence Clovis and Folsom Cultures Changes in the West California Indians The Northwest The Great Basin and the Plains Agriculture-Based Societies in the Southwest Cultural Diversity and the Arrival of Maize The “Chaco Phenomenon” Hohokam and Mesa Verde Cultures Eastern Woodlands Early Eastern Woodlands Traditions Adena and Hopewell Cultures Mississippian Chiefdoms The Iroquois Stories versus Science awnees explain their beginnings this Pway: Long ago, ancestors migrated south. Migrant Pawnees, the first man and woman, received life from Tirawa, a male spiritual representation of the upper cosmos who pos- sessed the powers of thunder and lighting. Because of Tirawa’s generosity, Pawnee man and woman, first represented in the man as the Morning Star to the east and the woman the Evening Star to the west, found the Plains, their new homeland. Pawnee origin stories vividly tell of a universe divided into male and female components. The Pawnee farmed and hunted along the Platte, Repub- lican, and Loup rivers that interlocked parts Artist’s rendition of Cahokia. 3 M01_TOWN9489_01_SE_C01.indd 3 09/12/11 11:41 PM 4 C h a p t e r 1 Native North America Before European Contact of Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado, along the outer reaches of the northern plains. Their settlement patterns and gendered division of labor complemented the Pawnee bond with the stars and earth. This relationship was most apparent in a rich Pawnee ceremonial, wherein Pawnees set corn medicine bundles next to posts at the center of villages and used the stars and an understanding of four sacred cardinal directions to target fertile lands. Broken into four village divisions that represented the four cardinal points, each village had corn and medicine bundles of different types to sustain balance between Tirawa and Mother Earth, a female cosmic being who represented fertil- ity. Mother Maize was the most powerful of the corns. Pawnee gave thanks to Mother Maize through elaborate rituals that included gifts of bison meat. Pawnee men and women and their subsistence activities followed the patterns established in their origin story, where men’s and women’s activities replicated a cosmic balance between the Morning Star to the east and the Evening Star to the west—the original Pawnee man and woman. Origin stories, like the one above, explain how a people came to be. Each Native American tribal group has an origin story, which is the root of the group’s cultural traditions. Yet these stories do not line up with native North America’s archaeological re- cord. The stories talk of places such as upper worlds and under worlds. They do not follow linear time as scientists do, and they are often vague about tribal peoples’ patterns of settlement and places of origin. A seeming incompatibility of origin stories and science has led to an intense and ongoing debate about the beginnings of Native American societies. At the center of this debate is the question of history itself. Scientists postu- late that an ice-free corridor, the Bering land bridge, opened in successive periods roughly between 30,000 and 13,000 years ago, connecting Alaska and Siberia and allowing for human migration. Scientists’ efforts to determine the exact timing and scale of each wave of migration are ongoing. Native Americans believe, however, the Bering land bridge argument has less to do with science and more to do with justify- ing native land dispossession. If native peoples did not originate in North America, but only migrated there, then they were just one of many waves of colonizers of the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, many Native Americans see scientific arguments as unnecessary because they believe their stories tell them everything they need to know about their own beginnings. Key Questions 1. How and when did people migrate to North 3. Describe and analyze the different phases of so- America? cial and cultural development in the Southwest. 2. How did Indian life change in the West after the 4. What kinds of societies and cultures developed Clovis and Folsom cultures died out? in the Eastern Woodlands? M01_TOWN9489_01_SE_C01.indd 4 09/12/11 11:41 PM C h a p t e r 1 Native North America Before European Contact 5 Chronology 30,000 bce–13,000 bce Bering land bridge open 13,500 bce–12,900 bce Clovis Culture 11,000 bce to 6,000 bce Folsom and Expansion of Paleo-Indian hunters on the Plains and the emergence of agriculture 900 ce–1150 ce Chaco phenomenon 300 ce–1450 ce Hohokam tradition 500 ce–1300 ce Mesa Verde 2200 ce–700 ce Poverty Point mound builders 1500 bce Reliance on cultigens in the Eastern Woodlands 1000 bce–200 ce Adena complex 200 bce–500 ce Hopewell culture 700 ce–1200 ce Mississippian culture and Cahokia 1200 ce–1450 ce Expansion of Moundville and beginning of Mississippian decline circa 700 ce–European Natchez & Coosa and other remnant Mississippian chiefdoms in the Deep South Contact 1000 bce–European Growth and concentration of Iroquois cultures Contact Beginnings Many Native Americans insist that their people populated North America long before the dates postulated by the Bering land bridge theory. They may be right. Most Pacific coast peoples have oral traditions of great floods. In the Bella Coola story, “When the water rose to the top of the mountain, they tied up and put the masks on top. The masks are there and still turned to stone.” The Bella Coola, like their neighbors, may have experienced flooding when the glaciers receded at the end of last Ice Age, during a period known as the Wisconsin Glaciation, when the land bridge opened between 30,000 bce to 11,000 bce (before the common era). If coastal peoples witnessed the rising tides of glacial warming, then they could have been in North America long before the supposed Bering corridor ever opened (see Map 1-1). We Were Always Here Prominent Native American scholar and activist Vine Deloria Jr. argues that native stories are “geomythology.” If geologists who study the earth can use sophisticated core samples of soil to date sediment activity and the expansion of topographical features over time, such geological data should not disqualify native stories as having similar, if not more important, value as a dating technique. In fact, native stories might be as far as people need to look. There are stories that tell of receding glaciers pouring water over the landscape. Hopis and other peoples in the South- west talk of vast fires, perhaps because of volcanic eruptions dating back hundreds of thousands of years. A few Indian stories contain precise descriptions of existing mountains and craters. And Pacific Northwest peoples talk about houses that were once on stilts to ward off mammoths. Students and scholars cannot dismiss all these stories as fiction. If Native Americans were here before the theoretical opening of the Bering land bridge, then the scientific argument that people crossed an open bridge either collapses entirely or needs much more investigation. M01_TOWN9489_01_SE_C01.indd 5 09/12/11 11:41 PM 6 C h a p t e r 1 Native North America Before European Contact 0 2,000 miles 0 2,000 kilometers Greenland Ice Sheet ASIA N NORTH AMERICA “Ice Free” Corridor ATLANTIC OCEAN Bering land bridge PACIFIC OCEAN Beringia Map 1-1 Bering land bridge The Scientific Evidence Scientists do not know the precise details of the first population movements to the Western Hemisphere. Many paleoanthropologists (scientists who study the origins of human beings) believe that people from northeastern Asia crossed the Bering Strait using a land bridge that con- nected Asia to what is now Alaska. Samples of soil drilled from the seabed between Alaska and present-day Siberia confirm that the Bering land bridge once existed. There is general agreement that hunter-gatherers crossed the bridge migrating through a narrow ice-free corridor. Still, questions linger. When, how, and in what numbers did these people, known as Paleo-Indians, migrate? Several significant archaeological finds illustrate some of the uncertainties surrounding the Bering Strait argument. Meadowcroft Rockshelter, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, gives archaeol- ogists a glimpse into the lives of the earliest people of the Eastern Woodlands, a commonly used designation for the territories east of the Mississippi River, running from present-day Canada to the Gulf Coast. Skeptics have claimed that the site’s bifaces, meaning stone-worked tools, were not manmade artifacts. Others use radiocarbon dating (a method that tests for a steady measur- able amount of carbon from archaeological site remains) to date the handmade tools to 13,000 bce to 12,000 bce or even as early as 30,000 bce. If these people used the Bering land bridge, their eastward migration following big game on foot to the Eastern Woodlands would have taken just one or two thousand years. Moreover, the stone tools at Meadowcroft were from a unique culture, unlike findings from the present-day plains and Southwest dated to the same period, and once considered the earliest tools used by people in North America. A recent coastal find on the southern coast of Chile at Monte Verde that includes mastodon bones with human-worked stone tools raises more questions about the Bering-Strait crossing. Radiocarbon dating suggests that people may have occupied Monte Verde as early as 12,500 bce or perhaps even much earlier. If the dating is correct, how did Paleo-Indians migrate so far south so fast? With other coastal sites in North and South America predating 20,000 bce, some scholars have offered a new hypothesis; peopling of the Western Hemisphere might have followed water routes as well as an ice-free corridor from Siberia.

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